The PCQuest magazing folks have created their own distribution, PCQ Linux 8.0, based upon Red Hat's 8.0 Linux. Read the introductory article about their distro at PCQuest.com.
With the recent beta release of Microsoft Office 2003 out the door earlier this week, many customers got their first look at what Microsoft hopes will re-write the office productivity landscape with a new ecosystem of collaborative functionality based on XML (define). But will organizations have to buy into an entirely Microsoft architecture to tap it? That's the contention of Gary Edwards, a Web app. design consultant and OpenOffice.org's representative on the OASIS OpenOffice XML Format Committee.
Robert Szeleney posted three new shots of SkyOS 3.9.6c. Impressive to see this hobby operating system getting so many new features and run impressively well, while it remains just a 1-2 man project.
Due to the recent hype surrounding LindowsOS I decided to take it out on a test-drive. And despite some bumps in the road, it all went pretty smoothly. Here is my review:
Slackware Linux 9.0 RC-3 is now available: Changelog, mirror list, direct download dir. Updates include automake 1.7.3, Nautilus 2.2.2 and Mozilla 1.3, but the qt library was kept at 3.1.1: "This was recommended by several people as an important fix for Opera, but installing it causes all kinds of display problems with KDE (particularly with fixed fonts such as the one used by Konsole). If you care more about Opera than KDE, you might want to install this, otherwise it's probably a bad idea." Update: ISO download (nightly builds) can be found here or here or here.
"UnitedLinux was designed by a group of Linux vendors to streamline their development and certification around a single Linux version. This server operating system combines technologies from each of its founding members. Released in November 2002, UnitedLinux is based on a wide variety of standards so that developers can design software that is portable across Linux platforms. UnitedLinux is a server operating system intended for Linux's primary growth areas — for enterprise and Web server applications."Read the article at TechUpdate.
This (kind of old but interesting) article gives you an overview of the Eclipse Platform, including its origin and architecture. Starting with a brief discussion about the OSS nature of Eclipse and its support for multiple programming languages, it then demonstrates the Java development environment with a simple program example. The article also surveys some of the software development tools that are available as plug-in extensions and demonstrates a plug-in extension for UML modeling. Info/shots of Linux version.
OSNews reader Alien_II sent us in the news about the release of ArkLinux 1.0-Alpha_7.1. You can read the announcement. ArkLinux uses KDE 3.1.1 (from the CVS) and kernel 2.4.21-pre5. Read more for an interview with ArkLinux's Bernhard "Bero" Rosenkraenzer and two screenshots of the latest release.
Mozilla 1.3 is released today and includes a number of new features and bug fixes. Update: On other browser news, Opera Software released Opera 7.03 for Windows and a preview release for Linux and FreeBSD. The OmniGroup released OmniWeb 4.2b2 recently as well.
A KDE developer tipped me off to a recent thread discussed in the kde-core-devel mailing list regarding interoperability between KDE and Gnome. OSNews featured an interview with the usability experts from Gnome and KDE a few days ago and we expected that the spirit of co-operation would continue to get stronger every day. Luckily this is true regarding most of these developers, but not for all of them are sharing it. Here is a commentary on the issue followed by a summary of the long thread.
Walter Kruse offers up his experiences with Peanut Linux over at DesktopLinux.com. Not talked about as often as more high profile commercial distros, this flavor of Linux is fast, lightweight, and suited to both new and advanced users. Kruse steps us through his reasons for making a move to Peanut as his distribution of choice and offers us some tips and links for customizing the environment.
Kondra Systems, just released a powerful virtual machine and C runtime combination that offers pre-emptive threads, virtual filesystem, floating point emulation, dynamic linker/loader, and true binary compatibility across all platforms in a 64k package.
Although it's among the market leaders in the low-end server business, Sun Microsystems Inc. has in recent years been known much more for its success at the high end. In this interview with Computer World, Neil Knox, executive vice president of Sun's volume systems product group, talked about his company's recent blade-server product launch, its emerging throughput computing strategy and Linux.
MandrakeSoft today announced the release of Mandrake Linux 9.0 for Opteron processors based on AMD 64-bit technology. This version of Mandrake Linux 9.0 for Opteron processors has been made available to MandrakeSoft's partners and is also available on several public FTP mirrors. This development will lead to a planned release in April 2003 of the 'Mandrake Linux Corporate Server 2.1' for AMD Opteron, a product dedicated to server deployment in medium to large accounts. Later in June 2003, MandrakeSoft will release 'MandrakeClustering' for Opteron, an easy-to-use clustering solution.
A thought-provoking ZDNet editorial talks about Intel's plans to bring the BIOS into the 21st century by making it more sophisticated and operating system-like. That will bring some welcome benefits to the PC world, but there are lurking dangers. The real birth of the PC platform was not IBM's invention of the PC or the release of the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual, but what rather Compaq's clean room rewrite of the PC BIOS. While IBM maintained proprietary control over the BIOS, it still had a stranglehold over the platform. Now, Intel wants to push through a new BIOS, and it's unlilkey that anyone will be able to pull off the clean room stunt again. Intel will own the PC platform going forward, even more than it already does.
"AOL sucks. There are many better, lower-cost ISPs. And Lindows sucks. There are many better, lower-cost Linux distributions available. These are articles of faith among sophisticated Internet and Linux users. But the Internet as a whole owes a lot to AOL and Steve Case, and Lindows is doing as much for Linux as AOL has done for the Internet, whether you like it or not." Roblimo editorializes.
Guest post by Intel Researchers (for OSNews)2003-03-12Intel19 Comments
Processors with Hyper-Threading technology can improve the performance of applications by permitting a single processor to process data as if it were two processors by executing instructions from different threads in parallel rather than serially. However, the potential performance improvement can be only obtained if an application is multithreaded by parallelization techniques. This article presents the multithreaded code generation and optimization techniques developed for the Intel C++/Fortran compiler. We conduct the performance study of two multimedia applications parallelized with OpenMP pragmas and compiled with the Intel compiler on the Hyper-Threading (HT) technology enabled Intel single-processor and multi-processor systems.
As it had promised, Microsoft said it will add support in Windows for the recently approved iSCSI storage standard, which allows storage networks to be built using existing Ethernet networks.
MySQL still lacks many features big customers want, but the software maker and CEO Marten Mickos have dazzling opportunities ahead. Intersting article, but too bad the article doesn't also mention PostgreSQL, BerkeleyDB and Firebird.
